This is the butterfly cluster, it was taken with a SBIG ST-402 by Ardis Herrold at the Desert Peak Observatory in Arizona on January 26 of this year. It is compressed of 30 photos all together. It's exposure time is 0.01 seconds. I begin to work with MaximDL 4 with this image. I first opened up all the images, since this is a black and white photo there were no filters. I then used the stack feature to put the all together using the SD Mask option. After I was satisfied with how it align I took it to Photoshop. There I made the background black and made all the stars white. I also used the airbrush tool on top of the stars to make them look more circular. I particularly like this image because it actually looks like what it's called, unlike a lot of other things up there in the sky. This is my star cluster requirement.
M63 (Sunflower Galaxy)
This picture is of the sunflower galaxy. It was taken by Ardis Herrold on her SBIG ST-402 camera on an unknown date (salsaj couldn't tell me). It was taken at the Desert Peak Observatory in Arizona with an exposure time of 1.10 seconds. I begin this image in MaximDL 4 where I took 10 red filers, 10 blue filters, and 10 green filters and used the stacking function to put them all together. It came out black and white which disappointed me. As you can guess, I went to Photoshop. I wanted to make this galaxy actually live up to it's name and make it yellow, but it was tough trying to only make the galaxy that color and not the background. After many countless videos on selective coloring I finally got something that I was somewhat happy with. What selective coloring does it that you can tell it what color limit you want meaning how much are you willing to go against a particular color that you select. I ended up selecting a gray color and lightly airbrushed what the selective coloring selected for me. I didn't want to get rid of the glow around the galaxy so I just left it as it is and airbrushed the background black. This meets my galaxy requirement.
Venus Transitting
This image is of the planet Venus transiting over the sun. It was taken by Alison Alexsy and her iPhone on June 5, 2012 at Grosse Pointe North high school. I couldn't do much with this image but I did slightly adjust the curves in the image with MaximDL 4, just to bring out a little brightness. The original image had the whole sun in it but I decided to rotate it and crop it so that the clouds that were passing weren't so much in the shot. This meets my picture I have taken requirement and also my sky scene requirement.
This is an image of the top of the moon. It was a group effort picture because we recorded it with a DVR set up to a telescope which we (Chris, Richard, Zach, Mrs. Herrold, and I) each contributed to. Once I got my little sliver of the video I took it to Registax and set alignment points on the big noticeable craters. This was my first experience with the program Registax so it was quite the learning experience. Although it was a long video Registax only allows 33 images to stack (about 6 minutes), so that's how many there are. Once they were all stacked I took the product the Liberator, free software that NASA provided on their website. Using one of their standard stretching options I got this image and since I couldn't figure out how to save it without it unstreching I took a screenshot and just saved it as a JPEG. This meets my moon requirement.
NGC7023
This lovely image is of Iris Nebula. It was taken in Arizona with a SBIG STL-11000 CCD camera at the Misti Mountain Observatory by Mr. Misti on 10/25/05. It is comprsized of three 25 minute red, green, and blue filters as well as a 85 minute long luminance filter and a 300s exposure time. The first thing I knew I had to do with this image was take it straight to MaximDL 4. I opened all 4 of the filters and stacked them. Once that was done I tried a simple stretch, but I was disappointed that I wasn't getting anywhere. I knew that these guys take amazing images. With a last effort I moved to curves, since this is such a big image it took a while for the changes to take affect. When I curved the line just a little bit--wow, the nebula was everywhere. Unfortunatlely it was black and white! No can do, so I used the color changer to change it to a nice mint color. The nebulaousity had really hard edged so I saved the image and moved to Gimp. I used the blur tool to make the edges more smooth. I attempted to get the little green dots off of the image but they seriously wouldn't budge. I have no idea what they were but even the healing tool in Photoshop couldn't remove them. This image fufills my requirement for a nebula and also an archived image from the internet.
This is a picture of Venus recorded by Alison Alexsy with the assistance of Mrs. Herrold on May 22, 2012 at Grosse Pointe North High School, MI. The video was a minute and twenty five seconds. I used Registax to turn the video into an actually image. Surprisingly, it was ridiculously difficult to align this thing. Since we kept changing the brightness on the video Registax kept getting confused and I didn't know how to trim to only the part I want. But atleast I got a somewhat good looking Venus. Once I got an image out of Registax I used Gimp to burn away the extra frames that was showing up in the image. I made the background black by burning online the shadows and then dodged only the highlights on Venus. All in all I think it's a pretty cool image because it's one of the phases. This meets my requirement for a planet.
